Guilt
by Ka.Ra.Ea
Summary: Casey has always taken the moral high ground, always been the good child and Nora and George always thought her responsible, no nonsense attitude was far preferable to Derek's devil may care life code. But Casey's no tolerance policy when it comes to Derek might just have caused the biggest mistake of her life and a massive divide in the McDonald-Venturi household.
1. Chapter 1

This is for mccarthy90210 who sent me the prompt for it centuries, nay, millennia ago and I only just got around to posting it even though I meant to weeks ago. This first chapter is kind of a tester to see is this is anything like what you meant before I get too into the plot (which is mostly formed but still alterable) so let me know if it's headed in the right direction. :)

Also, as always if anyone else wants to add some advice or let me know if it's coming on okay I do read all the comments, I'm just not great at replying. By the time I figure out what to say it's usually been so long you wouldn't know what I was talking about.

Disclaimer: Copy and paste some general disclaimer that I don't legally need but should add as a courtesy

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Casey dumped her school books on her bed, heading for her dressing table to remove the rest of her make-up and let down her hair in case she fell asleep studying. It was going to be a late night. She turned on her stereo, smiling when no techno or heavy rock came blasting out of the wall in reply and swapped her jeans for a pair of joggers.

A whole night where she could study uninterrupted. It seemed way too good to be true.

But Derek was going out with Sam tonight and their parents had taken the younger siblings away to see relatives in another state, leaving her with the house to herself for the evening, and God of Hangovers be willing, the night and following morning as well. With how much she was going to get done, she wouldn't have to think about homework for another two weeks! More than enough time to get her college applications in order.

Three hours found her glaring at the house phone as it rung for the third time in a row. She'd answered it the first time, but at the sound of Derek's drunken voice she hung up and didn't pick up again. She was going to get her night off. She was going to get the homework she'd asked for specially so she could get ahead done and ready to be handed in. She was certainly NOT going to let a drunken Derek talk her into finding him and Sam a way home because they'd got too wasted to drive after only a couple of hours, and she was NOT going to let them come back early and interrupt her studying so that they could avoid Sam's parents finding out they'd got drunk.

She relaxed as the phone stopped ringing, only to tense again as her cell started ringing in its place. She gave it a quick glance before muting it and picking up her textbook again. Probably Derek again

Another three hours and she was chewing on her lip, anxiously glancing at her phone every few minutes. Derek should have come stumbling through the door ages ago. At the very least he should have sent a gloating or guilt tripping text about how he'd gone to a friend's house or was getting yelled at by Sam's Mom. But there had been nothing since that one phone call to her cell.

Another hour and she was snoring with the cell pressed to her face, the voicemail that the phone had rung through to having run out of space and hung up a good while ago.

The next morning she awoke at 5:00 am with an imaginary version of Derek's voice sounding through her head, sprawled across her bed, books kicked either to the floor or the end of the mattress and phone fallen somewhere underneath the bed. It took a flashlight, a bumped head and one of Derek's hockey sticks to get it out again. She winced at the missed calls from her parents and went back to Derek's contact information, calling him again.

No answer.

She tried Sam next.

"Casey?" Sam's voice sounded muffled.

"Where's Derek and why isn't he answering the phone?" She raised her voice a little out of spite, hoping to make the headache Sam was bound to have flare up in revenge for not making Derek call her back.

"I don't know, he never showed last night." Sam said, a yawn interspersing the word 'showed' and not a sign of a headache.

"What do you mean he never showed? He left early so you guys could hit that burger place on the way!" Casey replied indignantly; she was not going to be fobbed off by half assed lies.

"I mean he never showed. Didn't arrive. I didn't see him." He took a deep sighing breath. "I ended up spending the evening with my sister painting her toenails while she told me about this book she's reading on female sexual fantasies. You think I would lie about that?"

She stopped for a moment. "Well, did you call him?"

"Yeah, I didn't get through. I called you after."

Casey frowned. "What time did you call him?"

Sam yawned again. "On and off from about eight until ten. Just went through to voicemail."

"But he called me a couple of hours after he left, he sounded drunk."

"I don't know what to tell you, I called, I got voicemail, I had what Cadence refers to as 'quality sibling time' and I went to bed. A place I'd really like to get back to if you're done."

"Yeah, sorry. Let me know if your hear from him" Casey hung up and looked at her phone for a moment, then brought up her call history. No missed calls from Derek, though there was one from Sam. About the time she'd thought Derek had called her. "What?" She stared at the screen, going off the call history and then back on it. The same. She turned the phone off and on again, but still no missed calls listed. There's no way he would have given up after calling the house phone and she knew he had her number. Her feet nearly slipped on the stairs as she ran down them, rushing to the answer phone for the house phone. 2 new messages. One from George checking that everything was ok and, thank God, a message from Derek. She barely registered the words the first time and played it again.

_"Hey, Case, nice of you to hang up on me! I've had a little accident. I may or may not have called in to see Beth for some pre-party drinks and I kinda crashed the car. Just a little though! But I figure I probably shouldn't get back behind the wheel. Call me a cab? I don't have a number for one and my battery is about to die. I'm just off route-"_

The message cut off, presumably due to lack of battery on Derek's end.

"Oh no, oh no, oh no!" Casey chanted, trying to call Derek again for no real reason. After his phone had died and no cab had turned up he'd probably started driving again. Derek was probably lying either dead or bleeding in some ditch somewhere having crashed the car again and been unable to call for help. All because she'd hung up on him instead of hearing him out.

She called the local hospital on the off chance, and then called the police. They weren't too interested to hear that her step-brother had gone out drinking, tried to drive and ended up stranded. It hadn't even been a full twelve hours yet. They told her to call back later if he still hadn't shown up. He was probably just sleeping it off in the backseat and would come back when he woke up.

No amount of Casey psycho babble would get them to change their minds.


	2. Chapter 2

And here is chapter two, which took a ridiculous amount of time to write considering I have the next three chapters pretty much planned out. The writing muses apparently don't like it when I try to be organised.

Disclaimer: yada yada yada

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As soon as the police had hung up on her, Casey rushed around to Emily's house, cell phone in hand and dialling her Mom as she ran. Nora picked up just as Casey reached their neighbours' driveway. "Mom? Something's happened." Casey babbled into the phone.

"What is it? Are you okay?" Nora replied immediately, clearly trying to stay calm.

"Derek called me last night because he crashed the car and I hung up on him but I haven't heard from him since and Sam hasn't either and his voicemail said his phone battery was dead and the police won't do anything!" She spoke so fast her words came out garbled and she wasn't sure how much her mother had understood, but it was the best she could do.

"Calm down, Casey, breathe." Nora instructed.

Casey did as she was told, as much as she could at any rate, and repeated her words a little slower. She clutched the phone to her ear as Nora told her to stay on the line and went to get George. She was still frozen in front of the Davison's door when Emily's mom opened it, a puzzled, concerned look on her face.

"Casey? Is everything alright?"

Casey bit her lip and breathed in, forcing back the tears straining at her throat and eyes. Her attention was diverted as George took the phone and Mrs. Davis ushered her in as she explained yet again what had happened.

The line was quiet for a moment. George's voice was cold when he finally answered. "We're on our way back. Call Sam and Ralph, the Davises, anyone you can get ahold of. We'll look for him ourselves."

"I am... I'm at Emily's right now, I thought I should call you and Mom before I called anyone else." Casey's eyes were blurry and her breath was sharp and painful, but at least she had near control of her voice again now. "I'm sorry, George, I am so, so sorry."

George hung up.

At some point Mrs. Davis had fetched Emily, whose arms now wrapped themselves around Casey, soothing shushing noises being murmured into her hair as she folded over to keep from being sick. "It's okay, Casey, it's going to be fine. My Mom is calling the PTA and my Uncle, he used to be a cop. They'll start searching soon and we'll find him." She planted a kiss on her friend's hair and gave her a squeeze. "You know Derek, the police are probably right, he's just sleeping it off in the car somewhere and all this'll be for nothing. You can get to yell at him for worrying you and he can yell at you for hanging up and then it'll all be back to normal."

Casey raised her head, random bits of her conversation with George chiming in her mind. "I have to call Sam and Ralph."

Emily sighed and looked uncertain, but passed her the phone from where she'd laid it down on the coffee table without even realising it.

She didn't even remember what she'd said to the boys after, or what they'd said in reply. Her thoughts were scattered and disjointed, memories and daydreams and conversations real and imagined all joining up and breaking apart in the wrong places. When she looked at the clock on her phone as Ralph let her know he was leaving to start the search, she was surprised how much time had passed without her knowing, yet when she looked again to check if twelve hours had passed so she could call the police again, she was shocked and endlessly frustrated by how slowly the time was going. It was only 7:30 in the morning. The day had really barely begun.

She decided to go and find this 'Beth' person and ask what time Derek had left her house, see if maybe she could work out whereabouts he'd have got to in between then and his calls to the house phone. She was eternally grateful when Emily came with her, already knowing who Beth was and where she lived with that strange school gossip superpower she had, and curbed her crazy, desperate interrogation of the poor girl into something approaching useful.

Beth really didn't have a clue. She gave some vague guess that didn't even set the hour in stone let alone anything else, but by some extraordinary stroke of luck, she had a Grandmother who lived with her and made a point of recording every move Beth or one of her 'little friends' made in minute and accurate detail. It was actually pretty creepy; a fact which Emily observed aloud once they'd left.

Derek had left Beth's at around 9:07 and the house phone had rung barely ten minutes after that, using that and the fact he'd started to say he was off route something-or-other Casey began to whittle down possible locations, reading them off to Emily to convey to the search party as she went. Considering that there weren't any 'route' anythings around and Derek just liked to talk like he was in an American movie when he was drunk, it could have meant anything, but she assumed he was talking about a main road at least and worked from there.

Her theory was confirmed half an hour later as Sam found the Prince on one of the roads she'd suggested. Derek wasn't with the car.

After that Casey had a minor panic attack, picturing him chopped up into little pieces having tried to catch a lift from a serial killer. The only thing that kept her from having a full blown one was Emily's patient and grounded assurances that that was extremely unlikely and a brown paper bag.

She somehow convinced Emily's parents to drive her to the discarded car and sat for what seemed like an eternity staring at the small dent on the side that hadn't been there before Derek had pulled out of the driveway the night before. Eventually her mobile found it's way back into her hands as she called to update her Mom on the search progress. In the end it was George who picked up and she had to hand the phone on to Emily as she found herself unable to face speaking with her step-father again. He was the only one who seemed to recognise what she had right from the beginning.

This was all her fault. If she had just kept on the line, found out where he was, called him a cab, Derek would be sat at home right now irritating the hell out of her with his over dramatic hangover and 'need' for bacon and daytime TV. But she hadn't. Because it was Derek and she always assumed the worst of him and had thought her homework was more important than whatever crisis he was calling about. Because she had no tolerance for her ridiculous step-brother and his slacker, skirt chasing ways.

Because she was as much of a stuck up, self-centered princess as Derek had always claimed.

She wished, oh, how she wished she could say that it would be the same if it had been the other way around, but she couldn't delude herself that much. Derek was always there when it counted. He needled her and teased her and tormented her, but when it came down to it he was the one who was dependable. He was the one people could turn to when things got bad. Even annoying, stuck up step-sisters who he couldn't stand.

And it was her fault he was missing.

She listened half-heartedly to Emily's 'hello, Mr. Venturi, It's Emily' and the gently and optimistically broken news on Derek, trying to get her brain in gear again, because if she could only _think_ she might be able to figure out what to do next. How to find Derek, how to work out what had happened to him, how to make this all right again.

But in the end it didn't matter. Sam found Derek, a few meters away up the road, and Emily's Dad called an ambulance and Casey rode with the Davises to the hospital while Sam sat in the back of the ambulance and told the paramedics all about Derek's allergy to novocaine that Casey had never known about.

Above all was the feeling, six hours later as her Mom and George finally made it to the hospital and gave her a wide berth, not once meeting her eye, that this was never going to be all right again. No matter what she did.


	3. Chapter 3

There's a bit of mean-ness and guilt tripping towards Casey in this chapter, but some of it is unintentional (from the people doing it, not me) and some can be put down to tiredness, stress, painkillers etc. It is a trend that will continue throughout the fic though, so you are warned.

Disclaimer: You got me! I am Daphne Ballon. That's why I'm publishing fanfic of my own work online and for free instead of making money off it. (In case you were wondering, that was sarcasm)

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George hadn't left Derek's bedside, even though he'd woken briefly about five times now, giving a statement to the police during one of the more lucid moments. The younger McDonald-Venturi's were with the Davises for the night and Nora was alternating between talking to doctors and bringing George endless cups of coffee.

Derek had been attacked. He'd got out of the car to stretch his back and legs and go find some bushes to pee in, and had been jumped. He had been beaten and robbed. Beyond that, Casey had no idea. The doctors wouldn't tell her and her Mom kept getting this sad look on her face and telling her they'd all know more later.

It was killing her. This was on her shoulders and she didn't even know what had happened. Not really. She didn't know how many attackers there were, how bad Derek's injuries were or the specifics of what was done to him. Or how long it had been after she'd hung up that it had happened, and that was the part she was equally obsessed with and scared of. All she knew was that it was bad enough that the doctors and nurses avoided her eye when she asked questions.

Casey hadn't been allowed in to see him, but then only George, Nora and the police had. Even Sam had to wait outside once they got to the hospital. She didn't know if that was down to hospital policies alone or Derek or George's wishes. They'd tried to make her leave, but she'd obstinately stuck it out, saying he was her family too and she needed to know he was okay. She wasn't a little kid, she could handle a late night and some bad coffee. Sam stayed for three hours, but then his Mom wanted him home, and without being allowed into Derek's ward there was little point in him staying. That left her alone in the waiting room.

A couple of times she tried to occupy herself with one of the magazines the nurses let her look at or the crossword book she got from the hospital store when she got up to stretch her legs, but she gave up when she realised she'd been reading the same page for nearly an hour and then the only word she could think of for the clue _vanishing act_ was 'missing'. She was failing to count the ceiling tiles (was it forty-two or thirty-eight?) for the fourth time when Nora sat down beside her.

"He's awake again." Nora's voice was tired and distant. "He asked to see you."

Casey straightened up so fast her pen rolled onto the floor and under a chair. She ignored it. "Can I go in?"

"Yes, sweetie," her Mom paused mid sentence, "but he's still a little dazed and the doctors told us not to ask him any more questions just yet."

Casey nodded, already standing and forcing herself forward on uncooperative legs. Her feet were numb from sitting in one position for too long and she stumbled a few times before she reached the door, cringing at the overwhelming pins and needles sensation as the blood flow returned. She took a deep breath and pushed through, heading for the curtain she'd seen the others slip through.

"Derek?"

A sleepy grunt signalled her further in.

Derek sat propped up in the bed, head lolling to the side a little and eyes glazed as the met hers. "Hey." The word was elongated and without follow-up.

"Hey. How're you feeling?" She asked tentatively.

George was still sat in the chair beside the bed and he shot her a blank look as she sat on the mattress close to Derek.

"'M good, they got me on some stuff that makes me a little dizzy." Derek answered. "Heard you pestered the police to find me."

Casey looked away. "A lot of good it did anybody. And I wouldn't have had to if I'd just picked up the phone."

"Or not hung up in the first place." Derek agreed. "Teach you to ignore inebriated, delinquent step-sibs."

A crack about long words and morphine was dying to tumble from her tongue, but she couldn't bring herself to mock him right now. "I'm so sorry, Derek. You have no idea how sorry."

"Hey, no crying!" Derek ordered, a look of panic in his eyes even through the drug haze, and Casey would laugh at that if she wasn't already disobeying him. "I'm the one in hospital here!"

"I know, and I put you there." Casey sobbed. She tried to stop, honest she did, but she was too exhausted to keep up the effort for long.

"Dad?" Derek shot an urgent look to his father.

George stood. "Come on, Casey, why don't you go back out to your mother."

Casey stood to do so. It wasn't fair to subject Derek to tears as well as everything.

"Wait," Derek piped up before she could get very far. "Come back and visit me?"

The shock of those words coming from Derek was enough to make her freeze in place. She nodded quickly and left.

George followed her out and stopped her before she made it to the chairs again. "I think it's best if you don't visit for a few days."

"But Derek just asked me to." Casey answered in confusion.

"He's going to be tired, and they won't keep this level of painkillers up for very long. I don't want you coming and stressing him out." George answered readily.

She nodded again, wiping at her cheeks with her sleeve and trying once again to compose herself. "Okay. But tell him I will come and see him, you know, once he's feeling a little better."

George made a tired noise that she took as agreement and turned to go back in.

"I really am sorry."

He showed no sign of having heard her.

After awhile, Nora came back around the corner, laden with another cup of coffee.

"Mom?"

"Yes, Casey?" Nora paused with her hand on the door.

"Could you take me home?"

Nora walked back over, stroking a hand over Casey's hair. "Of course. I'll just give this to George and let him know."

"Mom, how do I make this right again?" Tears were close again and she squeezed her eyes shut against them. She was starting to get a headache and she was so _tired_.

"I don't know if you can." Nora pressed a kiss to her daughter's head and went to deliver her husband's drink.


End file.
